Gallipoli Book Review: The Gallipoli Letter by Keith Murdoch

This was a short book, and mostly contained the complete text of the letter compiled by Australian journalist Keith Murdoch – yes, the father of News Corp CEO Rupert – with a foreword by historian Michael McKernan that adequately sets the scene.

The letter was composed from Murdoch’s mind, after a similar letter he’d been asked to bring off the Gallipoli peninsula by controversial British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was intercepted by French military police in Marseilles after another British journalist had tipped off British High Command. 

Murdoch’s letter was incredibly well received by political factions seeking to end the Gallipoli campaign, which they determined to be nothing more than a sideshow to the real war – against the Germans on the Western Front.

Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill, the two minds primarily behind the plan, were politically leveraged out of continuing the (stalemated) fight to break through the Dardanelles. After nine months of futility and so many deaths, you would think that Kitchener, particularly, being the military genius that he was, would’ve worked out that the Turks were dug in to stay. At any rate, Murdoch’s letter helped things on their way. It was the snowball tossed from the summit, and that snowball would later grow bigger, and the campaign would be called off.

So Murdoch’s role is a crucial one, and this was one of the first signs of the power of the media and, in particular, investigative journalism. Ashmead-Bartlett, an experienced battlefield reporter who favoured novel-like prose to bring events to his readership, as compared, say, to Australia’s official war historian Charles Bean who was more into the nuts and bolts of any given engagement.

Ashmead-Bartlett was not a favourite of the British High Command, most likely because he sought to tell the true story of Gallipoli, whereas Kitchener and his group wished to tightly control the narrative of the campaign, fearing both military and political fallout from a failed attempt to force the Dardanelles.

Murdoch was on Gallipoli ostensibly as a representative of the Australian government inquiring into mail and supplies for Australian troops after losing out to Bean in the race for official Australian war correspondent. Ashore at Gallipoli, he befriended Ashmead-Bartlett, who had concerns about censorship of the campaign. They were two peas from the same pod.

The letter was written – addressed to then British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith – and believed to be a secret between Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Alas, it was not, though being removed of the first letter did little to deter Murdoch, whose own copy, written during his time at the Australian High Commission in London, was addressed to Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. In tone, it was similar to Ashmead-Bartlett’s: hugely critical of British generals. David Lloyd George also received a copy, and soon the true account of Gallipoli was published throughout England, thanks to The Times and the Daily Mirror, and their influential proprietor, Lord Northcliffe. 

It’s interesting to note that in the beginning, Murdoch was shocked that his Gallipoli account had been made such public knowledge, but soon became friends with Northcliffe, leading to a long and impressive journalistic career.

There were some exaggerations and mistakes in Murdoch’s account, which was, remarkably, written from memory, and it led to Hamilton being removed from command, and then, finally, the evacuation of Gallipoli a few days before Christmas, 1915. It was the first sign of the power of the press, and Hamilton’s scalp was a big one.

So Murdoch’s work brought about the end of the campaign more successfully than any Turkish counter attack did – and we, as Australians, should be very thankful for that small mercy – and the first few pages of The Gallipoli Letter provide more background on both the English political climate at the time, and Murdoch’s experiences whilst on the Peninsula.

The Foxtel television series Deadline: Gallipoli (and, to a lesser extent, the Nine Network’s Gallipoli) delve into Murdoch’s role in the end of the campaign. Both shows are excellent.

Gallipoli Book Review: Quinn’s Post by Peter Stanley

The bastion known as Quinn’s Post after Major Hugh Quinn, the first commanding officer there, was said, by soldiers, to be ‘the hottest corner of Gallipoli’ and it was a vital position, too, sitting at a fork in what was known as Monash Valley. It was said that if Quinn’s was overrun, so, soon, would the rest of the ANZAC lines be rolled up by Turkish forces who would be on the beach in minutes. 

Not only were the Australian trenches dangerously close to the Turkish ones – close enough that they could hear the enemy talking, and vice versa – but they also occupied the low ground, meaning the Turks could lob grenades and fire rifles and machine guns from their higher elevation down into the network of trenches at Quinn’s. 

Famed war journalist, Charles Bean – who is responsible for meaty, early detail of the Gallipoli campaign and, in some ways, is also responsible for the beginnings of the Anzac Legend – wrote of Quinn’s that men pass by there, looking at it as they might have looked at a haunted house. Without doubt, it was a charnel house of almost unimaginable horror, where killing occurred day and night, and where so many wounded men lost hands or wrists or sometimes entire arms after attempting to toss grenades back from whence they’d come, back into the Turkish lines. They were successful on occasion, but the consequences when they weren’t were dire.

Just like with his excellent The Lost Boys of ANZAC (which I reviewed earlier, and can be found here), author/historian Peter Stanley focuses on a small part of the Gallipoli campaign and finds great success as a result. In ‘Lost Boys’, it was those men who had found their way far inland on the first day, and killed because they were so scattered. In Quinn’s Post, he captures the horror of that ugly and violent place.

Even if the rest of the Gallipoli peninsula was quiet, Quinn’s Post was a raging battle that seesawed back and forth. Australians would attack, gain Turkish trenches – generally using bayonets, the most gruesome way to take another man’s life – but a Turkish counter-attack would soon push them back. Bombs were thrown back and forth with violent regularity, not just the grenades issued to them, but, as supplies dwindled, homemade bombs, jam tins packed with nails, shards of metal and whatever else the ANZACs could find, topped off with a wick for detonation. It was a brutal example of Australian ingenuity on Gallipoli.

Stanley relies heavily on eyewitness evidence, framing diary, letter and memoir excerpts with snatches of prose from Charles Bean and other first-hand accounts of the violence and courage that saturated Quinn’s Post from the first hours of the invasion to the last gasp of the campaign, just before evacuation. Around that, with a historian’s eye for detail and a novelist’s eye for the dramatic, is a tight narrative of the long-running battle for command of one of the most important spots on the entire Gallipoli battlefield.

There is less about the lead-up and aftermath of the campaign and, indeed, very little other than some broad stroke detail on events going on elsewhere on Gallipoli that didn’t directly affect what was taking place at Quinn’s Post. It’s just the claustrophobia of close-in fighting that is ghastly to imagine and would surely have haunted survivors on both sides for the rest of their lives.

Quinn’s Post is both a tribute to the tenacity of men on both sides, and a stark reminder of why war should be avoided at all costs.

Gallipoli Book Review: The Lost Boys of ANZAC by Peter Stanley

The Gallipoli campaign, for better or worse, was the first defining moment in Australia’s history. Federation had occurred only 14 years before, and our country was still searching for it’s place on the world stage. Then, along came the Great War, and Australia was thrust into the unenviable position of trying to force a backdoor into Germany by way of Turkey and the Dardanelles. It was not, as we all know, even remotely successful. Or, to put it far less kindly, a poorly-planned stuff-up from the start.

Of course, every angle of the campaign has been dissected over the century since those first ANZACs stormed ashore on the Gallipoli Peninsula before dawn on April 25, 1915 – and I have read many of them, as you will see over the next few months, borne of a fascination about the campaign that has shaped our country ever since – but one area that’s barely been touched, at least not in great and fine detail, is the fate of the first few men ashore just after 4.00am on the first day.

Some of the greatest gains of the entire campaign were made in those early hours, but due to the ragged nature of the Australian advance – not helped by the fact that they were landed on the wrong beach – these gains were not able to be reinforced by fresh men, and a lot of soldiers who had ventured far into Turkish territory were killed and never seen again, taking their stories with them. Noted historian Peter Stanley is on the case, and this is the end result.

The Lost Boys of ANZAC is the definitive effort to capture the lives of these men, and there is plenty of information contained within these pages, a lot of it lifted from letters, diaries and more official communiques. It begins with the Lost Boys in the days and weeks prior to the declaration of war in Europe, through enlistment and training in Australia, then Egypt, final preparations for the Gallipoli campaign, the part they played on that fateful morning, and, interestingly, the impact on their families back on the home front.

Focusing on just a few of the main players and barely identifying others around them, makes this a more personal tale, and it’s a tragic one, because, sadly, you know how it’s going to end. I loved the way it examines life in Australia during those pre-war years and weeks. But it’s nonetheless a hard read, because of the inevitable. 

There was so much bluster and youth crushed and twisted that first morning at Gallipoli, and these so-called Lost Boys were perhaps the best illustration of this. These men made great strides into Turkish land, and died for their efforts, in most cases alone and cut off from their friends, descended upon by the enemy who, unlike the invading Australians, had both reinforcements and artillery available.

What I found most interesting about this book was how it extended beyond the shores of the Gallipoli peninsula to explain how each of these men’s families learned that their loved one had died. In some cases, this took weeks, for a flow of information from the battlefield was tightly controlled by the British – including a lot of censored mail coming from men fighting on Gallipoli – a fact which was said to have frustrated Prime Minister William Hughes no end. The wait for those at home must have been interminable, every day filled with dread.

Aside from perhaps highlighting the courage of the men who fought at Lone Pine, The Nek defended Quinn’s Post or the success of the eventual evacuation – ironically, the best thing that the campaign accomplished – there is obviously little to write positively about this campaign, a defeat in every way imaginable, and with great loss of life, but The Lost Boys of ANZAC stuck with me for a long time, for it was a particularly tragic tale of so much young life wasted so needlessly by British generals who did not care about casualties.

The first men to die for Australia are sometimes forgotten in amongst the countless thousands who perished later in the Gallipoli campaign or else in the Middle East and Western Front, but Peter Stanley has done remarkable work bringing the lives, short as they so tragically were, to some prominence.

The Lost Boys of ANZAC is a tremendous to the first handful of men who paid the ultimate price in the service of our country.

Album Review: Lee Kernaghan - Spirit of the Anzacs

In this centenary year of the Gallipoli landings, we’ve seen plenty of Anzac-related content on television (Channel Nine’s excellent but poorly-rating Gallipoli and the upcoming Foxtel presentation, Deadline Gallipoli), on the big screen (Russell Crowe’s excellent The Water Diviner) and in books (Peter Fitzsimons’ Gallipoli), so it’s no surprise that the country’s musicians are getting in on the act.

After attending the Australian War Memorial a few years back, country artist and former Australian of the Year Lee Kernaghan was significantly moved by what he saw and read in Canberra that he set about creating a tribute album to Australia’s rich and varied military history.

Working alongside long-time collaborators Garth Porter and Colin Buchanan, Spirit of the Anzacs is the end result of Kernaghan’s moving visit to the War Memorial: a vivid and far-reaching musical history of the Anzac from April 25, 1915 through to today, where, as is often forgotten by most of us in the course of our lives, Australians are still in harm’s way in the Middle East.

Whilst Kernaghan is most notable for his country music leanings, anyone who considers shunning this album because they think it’ll be straight-up country music would be doing the work a great disservice. Kernaghan is as varied here as he’s ever been. Yes, there’s the occasional country-driven tune, but they are few and far between. There’s something for everyone here, particularly the stirring, anthemic title track which features, amongst others, Shannon Noll, Guy Sebastian, members of Sheppard, Jessica Mauboy and Noiseworks front-man Jon Stevens.

What sets this album apart is the content. Each one of the songs has been crafted either by drawing experiences from letters and diaries from servicemen and women. Kernaghan and his team were given extraordinarily and unparalleled access to the vast archives at the Australian War Memorial, using so much source material to create some brilliant songs that will take you on what is at times a stirring journey (and, at other times, a bleak and stark one) through our country’s military history.

Every conflict that Australia has ever been involved in is represented here. From the fateful Gallipoli campaign (“To the Top of the Hill”), the light horse campaign in the Middle East (“We’ll Take Beersheba”), the Western Front (“Oh, Passchendaele”) to the Pacific theatre in World War Two (“Kokoda – Only the Brave Ones”), the attack on Australian soil in Darwin (“When The First Bombs Fell”), the Korean War (“We Heard a Bugle Play”) and on to the bitter fighting in modern-day Afghanistan (“The Dust of Uruzgan”) Kernaghan charts the Anzac legacy, and features a guest vocal appearance by Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith.

This is epic song-writing, some of it theatrical at times, especially ‘We’ll Take Beersheba’ which features samples of jingling chain, men shouting orders, horses whinnying. A far cry, for certain, from Kernaghan’s usual musical surroundings. Each song is a journey through some of the foreign fields of battle that have come to best define the Australian spirit. Not all of the songs have a happy ending, but they should – and probably will – stay with you a long time after the final track has faded to silence.

One thing that I don’t usually bother with is a physical CD, but Spirit of the Anzacs has a great booklet that briefly mentions the origins of each song, often with photos of the men and women whose hopes and fears Kernaghan and his team have turned into these emotional songs.

With the 100 year anniversary of the Gallipoli landings fast approaching, do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of Spirit of the Anzacs. It’s a powerful testament to a century’s worth of Australian valour, courage, commitment and sacrifice on the battlefield. It’s brilliant.